by Tom Blair
Columnist

So our politicians (once again) didn’t get their job done, and there are going to be a lot of 5% cuts in government spending. I doubt that their salaries got cut 5%, but what is the problem with cutting back government spending? Maybe they won’t be buying $100 hammers and $200 toilet seats?

I watched one of the investigative programs and they talked about the “contractors” who do the laundry for our soldiers and what they charge. For one load of laundry, they charge enough to go to Wal-Mart and buy a new set of clothes!

An article in the New York Times reported that “in 33 of 35 occupations, the government actually paid billions of dollars more to hire contractors than it would have cost government employees to perform comparable services. On average, the study found that contractors charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, found some very interesting things to ponder. For example, a study found that on average, the federal government paid contractors $268,653 per year for computer engineering services, while government workers in the same occupation made $136,456.

For human resources management, the federal government paid contractors an annual rate of $228,488, more than twice the $111,711 to have the same services done in-house.

Years ago, the private had KP duty and peeled potatoes for the mess hall; now we pay private contractors a real healthy lump of money to prepare all the food.

Just a few things you may remember in the news: the missing $25 billion (buried in the Department of the Treasury’s 2003 Financial Report);

Medicare overspending and fraud, credit card abuse at the Department of Defense (over an 18-month period, Air Force and Navy personnel used government-funded credit cards to charge at least $102,400 for admission to entertainment events, $48,250 for gambling, $69,300 for cruises, and $73,950 for exotic dance clubs and prostitutes);

embezzled funds at the Department of Agriculture (300 employees’ purchases over six months, investigators estimated that 15 percent abused their government credit cards at a cost of $5.8 million. Taxpayer-funded purchases included Ozzy Osbourne concert tickets, tattoos, lingerie, bartender school tuition, car payments, and cash advances.).

Also remember the unused flight tickets totaling $100 MILLION bucks, when the Defense Department purchased and then left unused approximately 270,000 commercial airline tickets at a total cost of $100 million. Even worse, the Pentagon never bothered to get a refund for these fully refundable tickets!

This is just the tip of the iceberg of all the B.S. that our government wastes our tax dollars on, and nothing gets done about it. So maybe this sequester thing just might be a wakeup call for Washington.

Tom “Road” Blair

Website: www.tomroadblair.com